On Reading Poetry

30 Janeiro 2020, 10:00 • Don Howard Bialostosky

The instructor provided a model for reading poetry that attends to the interactions of a speaker, an addressee, a topic or hero of the poem, and precedent speakers to whom the speaker is responding. The relations among these persons in a particular kind of utterance in a particular situation will be the main thing to look for. He illustrated this method of reading by engaging the class in a reading of Langston Hughes’”Theme of Englsh B,” Its speaker responds to an assignment quoted at the outset of the poem with a meditation on his identity that issues in his theme, a theme that discovers a common and uncomfortable American identity shared with the instructor and makes the speaker realize he has something to teach his teacher.